Forensic and Legal Cognition

Dear Colleagues,

The understanding of cognition in forensic and legal contexts has enormous implications on the fairness of justice systems. Decision makers (such as forensic analysts, jurors and judges), eyewitnesses and other individuals involved in justice are vulnerable to many different types of psychological biases and errors that can result in miscarriages of justice. In research, different legal actors are often treated separately, despite these actors utilizing similar cognitive processes. For example, police officers, jurors, judges and forensic analysts are likely to use similar decision-making processes. In this Special Issue, we invite you to submit your original work to Behavioral Sciences for our upcoming Special Issue dedicated to Forensic and Legal Cognition. The goal of this Special Issue is to explore interactions between psychological processes and forensic and legal contexts, thereby covering the cognition of a wide range of legal and forensic actors in one issue.

We encourage a commensurately broad range of topics within this interdisciplinary fields. Examples of relevant areas include, but are not limited to, the following: eyewitness memory and testimony; cognitive bias in forensic analysis; juror and/or jury decision making; judge decision making; and cognitive factors in legal and forensic reasoning.

Abstract Deadline: December 22, 2024.
Notification of Abstract Acceptance: January 22, 2025.

Dr. James Munro
Dr. Lee Curley
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Behavioral Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2200 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.